When I started, digital goods were essentially not taxed at all.  (Pretty sure it's still the same in the U.S.)

Some time back, Europe started charging VAT (basically a sales tax) on digital goods.  But the taxes are assessed for the country of the purchaser and you have all of these requirements for validating where they live to be sure they aren't cheating.  You have to maintain some kind of business relationship with each country in which you do business, also... I think maybe have have a local lawyer or something.  At some point I just stopped paying attention because already it was too onerous.  There was no minimum threshold or anything.  If you wanted to sell $5 worth of digital goods in Luxembourg then you had to register with them, pay taxes, keep records specific to that country, etc..

For the EU, they are talking about making it a central registration and then adding a minimum threshold.  Both of which would go a long way, though for me not necessarily solving the issue.  At least a small business wouldn't have to worry about getting foreign lawyers and accountants involved until you started making enough money to almost cover the costs.  (Though I think the threshold is like 10k which still isn't great.)

Anyway, to run my own store front got super complicated.

I mean, I don't think I care, really.  As long as it's legal then transfer is fine with me.

Given the way international sales taxes for digital goods have gone since my original business plan, I'm not sure how much of it is still valid anymore, anyway.  Selling digital goods internationally is quite a hassle now and there is every likelihood that if I ever get to that point I will just sell through someone else's store front (like Steam or whatever).

The EU is making steps in the right direction at least but I'm not at all confident that my original ideas will fly.  It's too bad, though, because I still think a mod store was a good idea.  It just starts to become a big mess now.

So how'd the thanksgiving development go?

It went ok.  It was kind of an emotional roller coaster on some level.

On Tuesday/Wednesday I finally got to the point where I was integrating the SimEthereal networking library.  It was incredibly painful and I had to rewrite lots of stuff to convert it over to use some of my other open source projects (a win mostly).  I worked like 10 hours straight and I wanted to chuck the whole thing and start over from like 2 hours in.  It was a very disheartening day.  Fortunately, I felt like it was one of those cases where even if I decided in the end this wasn't going to be the final solution, getting it done would at least teach me what I needed to know to fix it.

And so I got that working.  I can log in and move around.  Physics is handled by the server and my client is a 100% slave to it.  Connecting to my local machine doesn't even feel too laggy.  Ultimately, to make this solution the final solution is going to require a lot of changes and it will be very painful... but having something working already is gold.

I did a lot of soul searching during that 10 hours and the next day as I fixed bugs that cropped up.  The reason I wanted to chuck it all and start over is because it's only when trying to thread such a complicated thing into an existing complicated thing that we can see that we did everything up side down.  In my hurry to clean things up and work on fun new rendering, etc. 3 years ago or whatever, I chose to refactor the whole engine.  What I should have done was wait until I had a networking solution and then build a networked game from the ground up.  Adding rendering and menus, etc. to a working network base is way easier than doing what I did.

I mean, to be fair, that never would have worked out.  I've learned a lot about creating networked games and other tech in this last three years (4 years? ugh).  And that was more or less the realization I came to after I had the basics working and was just fixing stuff.  If I refactor again, I have to be careful what I know and what I don't know yet and how that will alter what I do.  For example, AI is a huge missing piece and that might affect the architecture.  (Though never as bad as networking would... just not possible.)

I also realized that whatever I do, it will need to be done in a way that I can make incremental progress even if I don't have solid week blocks of time to work on it.

Fortunately, I'm kind of in a nice place right now.  Even to finish networking support to get the missing parts in, I can now do in smaller chunks.  For example, right now multiple players can login but can't see each other... though we can see the block changes we make.  My current task is to get avatars visible.  (Which has a really nice encouraging moment too *)  I also need to go back and fix all of the terrain feedback loops... for example, changing a block does not update the larger terrain info summary files that are used for the far terrain.  So even though I will probably never be able to show buildings and such in the far terrain, if someone flattens a mountain or makes a new lake, that kind of thing should show up.

Anyway, there are a lot of things that I can work on now in small chunks.  Also, because I did do a bunch of things right in the last refactoring, if I start with a blank network base at some point in the future, pulling stuff over is fairly trivial without a total rewrite.

One thing that stuck me is that if I wanted to make an app that used a Mythruna world but displayed it in a different way (say as an isometric view or something), I'd be starting from ground zero.  With the old engine, I could easily use the terrain stuff just as a library but the setup required to do this is pretty impossible in the new engine.  Open sourcing stuff has been pretty beneficial for me overall.  I get bug reports in Lemur and SimEthereal, etc. and those projects are now constantly improving and generate constant motivation to keep moving forward.  I will probably take that approach with a variety of Mythruna's subsystems.  Even if I don't open source the whole engine, open sourcing the terrain library, the object scripting system, the dialog system, etc. will greatly improve all of those things, let a community of folks potentially help improve them by using them in their own games, and give modders a nice fully open base upon which to build their own Mythruna add-ons.  The only down side is literally also a huge up side: it will take me a bit longer to develop them because I have to make them cleaner and document them a bit more.

But really, when I'm having to take the occasional really long breaks... I need all of that for myself, too.

So by the end of the Thanksgiving week, I have a new more optimistic approach to everything.  I have an engine that I can continue to work on.  I have a dozen ideas for ways to improve the work flow and make it more efficient... and none of them will require large blocks of time.  I haven't written up a larger blog post yet because a) not many people read these anymore, and b) the push kind of isn't over yet.

I still have to get some things working before I can give myself my "Can play Fallout 4" reward.  Plus, I find myself on the moment at a temporary forced vacation because of some contract-related stuff at my day job... which is a nice little island of respite in a sea of totally-bat-poop-crazy-busy... before my 12 day long winter break.   By new years, I hope to have even more optimistic things to say about the future of the engine.

(*) the nice surprise was that I'd wired a whole bunch of MOB/avatar stuff together already to even include a nice little tester app.  It's really nice code and I was able to add a giant-rat pretty easily as another mob type.  Discovering this and some of the other nearly-fully-working things I'd already done was a nice surprise after the 10 hour slog I'd done the days before.

JME had a couple forum changes since then, I guess... so this is the latest one: https://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/c/user-code-projects/mythruna

I should correct the link but it also isn't like I post anything there anymore, either.

Also, for twitter users... if you don't already follow me then you may want to add:
@MythrunaGame  https://twitter.com/MythrunaGame
and
@Simsilica  https://twitter.com/Simsilica

Both should be seeing more activity this week as if I'm going to want to say some random transient thing out loud then that's where I will do it.

Yeah, I've taken the week off.  We'll see what we see.  Life has a way of snatching my weeks back from me.

Anyone who is a patience-masochist can feel free to watch the Trello page from before:
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

I've been updating it a bit... I don't even know what's relevant anymore as I try to dig things out of mothballs and get it all working again.

I noticed this as being one of the bugs you entered: "Client goes ape-doodoo if the player does not have a valid position. to Bugs (in no particular order)". When(or perhaps more appropriately, where) would that be a problem? I figured that that should kind of be expected, and if the position is invalid then the player is probably already in an irreconcilable place.

Well, there's failing and there's "Not finishing the loading screen" or "crashing in a half dozen seemingly unrelated ways".

What I'd expect: "game loads but you are positioned in the ground at some weird location"

The first time I ran the game, it never got past the loading screen and just waited forever.  30-45 minutes of tracking later and found that issue.  Then I got crashes in the drop shadow filter.  Fixed that.  Then I got random crashes from deep in the heart of JME telling me I was modifying things from the wrong thread.  (I was not but confirming that took me 3+ hours.)  For some reason, camera position ends up as NaN, NaN, NaN instead of 0, 0, 0... and the rotation is also NaN (<- which explains the position actually).  NaN = a special floating point value of "Not A Number".

In coding, whenever you find a case where one simple error causes a whole cascade of really nasty things, it's worth pulling that thread because there are likely 100 bugs buried in there waiting to jump on you at some other inopportune time.  Somewhere here is a case where the player rotation gets messed up.  There is nothing that would SET player rotation to NaN so until I look, I cannot guarantee that something else wouldn't trigger this case also.

Yeah, I've taken the week off.  We'll see what we see.  Life has a way of snatching my weeks back from me.

Anyone who is a patience-masochist can feel free to watch the Trello page from before:
https://trello.com/b/ePlfYipE/mythruna-networking

I've been updating it a bit... I don't even know what's relevant anymore as I try to dig things out of mothballs and get it all working again.

I'm not ignoring this (well technically I am but only temporarily) but I just don't have time to drill into it right now.  I'll get to it when my coding vacation is over.

...just wanted you to know I wasn't ignoring it in general.

Yeah, I've taken the week off.  We'll see what we see.  Life has a way of snatching my weeks back from me.

I just don't know.

I would like to have a gossip system but it's tough to be sure that will work in a world of such large scale.

Yeah, for our dog we have a health plan so we take her for regular checkups, teeth cleanings, etc... she's actually due for another one at the moment.

I'm still here... which hopefully goes without saying... but then you never can tell in this crazy life.

-snip-

Nice! We didn't even set pumpkins out this year, ourselves. Between work and college most of the fam just wanted a break today. I don't think any of us would have the patience to manually make the decorations like that, and they look great!

I guess it took us about an hour... but now my kids have a new appreciation for what handmade fishing nets must take to create. 

When I was in elementary school, I quite often made spider webs like this using various colors of yarn.  This time I chose white masonry line... which had its disadvantages.

1) it barely stretches so you have to build in all of your slack ahead of time.  (Yarn you can tie pretty tight and still pull the web together after.)
2) it's slippery... not such a big deal for the kids but definitely was for mine.  I ended up having to tie knots in the base string to keep the vertical web from slipping.  That meant I couldn't adjust it artistically after the fact.
3) knots in masonry line are considerably 'thicker' than the line itself.  Yarn is puffy so the knots get hidden... or are smaller.

Anyway, it was fun and the white line definitely "registered" better in the dark.

I ended up twisting a quick palm-sized spider from black pipe-cleaners to hang from the center of the web the kids did.  That's why those strings were hanging down waiting.

Taking the kids trick-or-treating... that's pretty much it.  Nothing particularly exciting.

The daughter wanted to decorate the house for Halloween this year.  We normally don't... but as is often the case with dads, I'm more or less powerless to resist such requests from her.

Here they are following instructions on hand-crafting a spider web:


And the finished product:


I did the big web with the giant black spider.  I was tying the cat to the rail when it started to pour rain... I thought it made the scene look extra spooky so I took a picture.

Some day I will actually finish the railing on the wheel chair ramp and we won't be able to do the bottom spider web... but for now it works.

Taking the kids trick-or-treating... that's pretty much it.  Nothing particularly exciting.